SUFFER THE CHILDREN

Boy sold for spare parts by his grandmother

Andrey should be dead, and he knows it. Ask Andrey what was meant to happen to him and he will gesture at his legs, making a cutting motion. He mimes a knife slicing open his chest and his heart being pulled out, and then he draws his finger across his throat.
It was his grandmother, Nina Tkacheva, who came up with the plan. Abandoned by his mother, Andrey, 5, was living in an orphanage outside the town of Ryazan, about 130 miles south of Moscow.
Then one day, three years ago, Tkacheva turned up to collect him. She had arraAnged for a wealthy friend to take him to Disneyland Paris, she said.
In fact Tkacheva had sold Andrey so that he could be taken out of Russia, killed and his organs used for transplants in a foreign clinic.

[This story differs from those of thousands of other children in that it ends happily -- he was saved and is now living with adopting parents in Scotland.]

Remember the urban myth about travellers waking up in a bathtub full of ice with one of their kidneys missing? Well read this. Surgeons in Moscow hospitals are removing kidneys from patients who are not yet dead in order to supply the lucrative transplant market, according to a public television report.